Tracking Video Game Genre Popularity

In the early '90s, platformers like Super Mario Bros. were all the rage, but by the end of the decade that style of game had declined in favor of military/sci-fi shooters. Gaming tastes are constantly in flux. Let's take a look had how they've evolved over the last several decades.

Reddit user NcikVGG recently datamined 24,000 games released since 1975 and compiled a couple charts that display how much gaming tastes have changed over the generations. Check out these two figures which chart the percentage of video game genres released each year. It's interesting to note how little space the FPS genre actually takes up, even though it owns a large mindshare within our industry. It's likely that shooters make up a larger portion of the games that people actually buy, since some of the most popular franchises on the market are shooters, but overall shooters don't make up as large a part of the market as you might think.

Some things seem obvious, such as the decline of arcade and text based adventures. But it's interesting to see how puzzle games have ballooned since the popular spread of smartphones. It also seems odd that sports games have declined over the last five years, and that racing games seemed so popular in the '70s. I also thought it was interesting that RPGs have remained relatively strong; in spite of the decline in JRPGs, many western RPGs have released to fill that gap.

Check out a chart that measures the number of games releases for different systems over the last four decades.

What do you think of these stats? What has been your most popular system/genre?